The one silver lining of the slow-motion apocalypse of the supply chain is that having each given the other IOUs for our respective birthdays, ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
rushthatspeaks and I were able to exchange birthday presents this evening. I had ordered him a dress of purple dragons from Princess Awesome that arrived three months late thanks in part to a typhoon; he had gotten me Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley's The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (2017). We read through the latter hungrily. I will need to find a local source of juniper. Then he showed me Patrick McHale's Over the Garden Wall (2014), which I firmly believe should be an October tradition. Within the first few episodes, I was comparing its autumn country to Ray Bradbury and Greer Gilman; by the end of it I would add Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, and Carl Sandburg, but a catalogue of pastiche misses the point that it while it is full of echoes and allusions and hat-tips, it is also very much its own fairy tale and as successful a new one as I have seen in ages. It is funny and eerie and awkward and poignant and intensely liminal. The time-slipped specifically New England flavor was particularly attractive to me. Plus I knew both of the opera singers in the cast, whom I hadn't been expecting at all. I would like to get hold of the soundtrack. The animation would be satisfying just to stare at, but the story seems to have rung hard with me and I am all right with that. In some ways I have had so little of this month.
rushthatspeaks and I were able to exchange birthday presents this evening. I had ordered him a dress of purple dragons from Princess Awesome that arrived three months late thanks in part to a typhoon; he had gotten me Sean Sherman and Beth Dooley's The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen (2017). We read through the latter hungrily. I will need to find a local source of juniper. Then he showed me Patrick McHale's Over the Garden Wall (2014), which I firmly believe should be an October tradition. Within the first few episodes, I was comparing its autumn country to Ray Bradbury and Greer Gilman; by the end of it I would add Nathaniel Hawthorne, H.P. Lovecraft, and Carl Sandburg, but a catalogue of pastiche misses the point that it while it is full of echoes and allusions and hat-tips, it is also very much its own fairy tale and as successful a new one as I have seen in ages. It is funny and eerie and awkward and poignant and intensely liminal. The time-slipped specifically New England flavor was particularly attractive to me. Plus I knew both of the opera singers in the cast, whom I hadn't been expecting at all. I would like to get hold of the soundtrack. The animation would be satisfying just to stare at, but the story seems to have rung hard with me and I am all right with that. In some ways I have had so little of this month.
